Even in the most rigid factory systems, shortcuts have a way of slipping through the cracks.

A weekend worker’s suspiciously perfect stats set off a chain of events that nearly flooded the line with defective parts.

Read on for the full story!

The ‘weekend guy’.

Back in the 1970s, I was working in an automotive transmission factory as an inspector.

The part I was checking had to be very straight.

There were high stakes to getting the job right.

If it wasn’t straight, it could be straightened.

But if it went on to heat treat (the next process after my inspection), it couldn’t be bent straight.

It had to be scrapped.

This inspector usually had very specific quotas to hit.

I was able to check around 400 pieces each night—sometimes more, sometimes less.

A lot depended on the percentage of ‘bent’ pieces in each lot.

The guy on day shift was getting similar numbers.

But then one weekend employee threw the whole system off balance.

This was fine for a couple of months, until someone worked a Saturday overtime shift at my station.

At the start of my shift the following Monday evening, my foreman informed me that the “weekend guy” had checked 700 pieces, and he expected me to check 700 that night.

This immediately seems suspicious to the seasoned inspector.

I tried to explain that the only way to check 700 pieces would cause a lot of bad parts to get through.

“Do whatever you have to do, I want you to check 700 pieces tonight,” was the advice I was given.

Upon investigation, they found their hunch was correct.

When I got to my workstation, I saw that the weekend guy had indeed “checked” 700 parts.

Exactly 700 parts. With exactly 400 “good” parts, and exactly 300 “rejected” (needing to be straightened).

No way those numbers represented accurate measurements.

They came to a final conclusion.

Normally, I’d only have 40 or 50 pieces out of 400 needing straightening.

These were fake numbers—although there were 300 pieces ready to be straightened, so I assumed that 400 had indeed gone to heat treat.

Then they reported what they found to their higher-ups.

But I followed the procedure I had explained to the foreman, still trying to be as accurate as possible.

I checked something like 650 parts, with around 200 pieces in the “re-operate” racks.

Soon, they decided to go back to the inspector’s way of doing things.

Tuesday night, the foreman stopped me and told me to go back to the way I had been checking previously.

Apparently, between the weekend guy’s 400 “good” pieces, my “good” pieces from Monday evening, and presumably the pieces from day shift on Monday, there were a lot of scrap pieces coming out of heat treat.

A job well done should never be underestimated.

What did Reddit think?

This commenter wonders what really went on behind the scenes.

This commenter’s got jokes!

You can’t always have it both ways.

When something seems too good to be true, that’s because it usually is!

In the end, the bosses learned that accuracy doesn’t scale on command.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.